Is Your Enterprise Cloud-Enabled?

Let’s set the stage with a couple of assertions:

There will be a proliferation of cloud solutions within an enterprise – recall the days of client/server computing, where each line of business (LOB) or department went out to purchase its own solution, outside the control of IT.

Recognizing the previous assertion, enlightened IT leaders have already started working proactively with their peers within the LOBs, sourcing, and with the financial controllers, to “educate” them about cloud, and ensure that they and IT are invited to the party!

Within this context, and before delving into enterprise architecture, let’s consider for the moment different aspects of a system.

Business and IT tend to focus more initially on the functional rather than the qualitative aspects of a technology or system. Functional is more fun, less abstract — you can see, touch, and feel it. The toys.

However, business should care most about the qualitative aspects. The most publicly embarrassing failures of cloud computing have all been caused by qualitative issues. Things like availability during peak trading, security and privacy make the news if neglected, and can damage reputations permanently.

With the cloud, the discussion tends to gravitate toward functional, technical topics. The labels we use re-enforce this — IAAS, SAAS, PAAS; who talks about Availability as a Service? If you’re lucky enough to have a qualitative discussions at all when talking about cloud solutions, they tend to be focused below the waterline: “We have highly available servers, no single points of failure, in secure data centers.” Sometimes customers simply assume a high quality implementation, with scant or no evidence.

The nature of cloud offerings in the market today, because of a lack of industry standardization, means each supplier’s offerings have different qualities, some of which might not even be exposed above the waterline.

The net risk is that, as organizations deploy more and more cloud solutions, which in themselves and individually, meet the business requirements of a project, overall they start to undermine and eat away the integrity of the enterprise architecture.

In other words, as a system or systems grow, the overall qualitative requirements of an organization are at risk and possibly are not being met.

Looking back at our assumptions, this creates the perfect storm – uncontrolled proliferation of cloud solutions within the enterprise, and nobody overseeing the overall qualitative requirements of the enterprise.

So, what can IT do?

The enterprise architecture (EA) function has to first recognize this issue, reinvent itself as a new, enlightened, and forward thinking EA, which proactively engages the business. An EA that sees itself more as a part of the business, as opposed to a part of the IT department. Cloud discussions have to belong initially in the EA domain, reaching out to the business – they do not belong solely in the business, in isolation in EA, or in IT operations.

Enterprise architecture — responsible for the city plan — has to consider the qualitative domains throughout the enterprise, and in context of the myriad cloud and on-premises solutions or delivery models, and express this as a set of cloud-enabled principles and policies. EA cannot leave this to individual projects.

IT Service Management (ITSM) equally has to recognize the reality that cloud computing puts powerful tools in the hands of the business. Businesses will adopt cloud solutions without supervision, because it is low friction and easy. Despite the fact that IT may not participate in the vetting, selection and deployment process, businesses will naturally expect full IT support. This creates a tremendous danger of IT responsibility without authority, and customer authority without expertise. The solution is that, ITSM has to proactively engage and adapt its processes for this new delivery model and educate businesses on qualitative factors for cloud computing.

Image: Courtesy of IBM

Let’s consider the key qualitative domains, in an enterprise that is adopting a number of cloud solutions and delivery models, from an EA and ITSM perspective:

Qualitative domain

EA considerations

ITSM considerations

Capacity and performance (volumetrics)

Is all my capacity for a specific type of resource coming from a single source? Have I considered the overall latency landscape – where are all the cloud solutions located? How do my EA principles and policies ensure we avoid some of the pitfalls?

Is there sufficient capacity across the cloud solutions to support all my business services at peak time? What if I need more capacity? What does my cloud- enabled capacity plan look like? Do I understand each supplier’s lead times?

Availability

Is the technology supporting my business services fairly evenly spread across suppliers, or are there hotspots? What if there is an issue with a single supplier? Do my EA policies mandate the use of multiple suppliers? At which architectural layer have the availability requirements been predominantly solutioned?

Do I understand how high availability is maintained both within and across cloud suppliers? How am I monitoring the disparate cloud solutions that are supporting my business services?

Security

What are the corporate security and or industry compliance requirements that I have to consider? How do I ensure that as a whole, the enterprise meets these?

How do I manage compliance checking? How do I handle security incidents, possibly for multiple cloud solutions and suppliers?

Systems Management

Do I have a unified systems management architecture? Should I consider it? What impact does this have on my existing business systems management tooling – single viewpoint of the health of all business services regardless of delivery model? Do certain standards need to be specified so that new cloud solutions can integrate with the systems management architecture?

Can I efficiently monitor and manage an enterprise consisting of multiple cloud solutions and delivery models? Do I have a proliferation of management tools and an emerging skills issue?

Manageability and Maintainability

Each cloud supplier is likely to have maintenance windows – do any clash? Is my service management function geared to work in this hybrid delivery model?

Portability

How easy is it to move between suppliers? Do my EA standards ensure that services are portable across suppliers in case of issues , or if I want to move for commercial benefit?

If suppliers are changed, what ITSM processes and documentation need updating and reviewing? What about changes to supplier management?

Business Constraints

Are there any geographic constraints that I should consider? Is my delivery relatively well distributed globally, or are there hotspots in areas of risk? Are there data privacy considerations? Do EA principles and guidelines assist in the selection process? Are suppliers transparent regarding delivery?

Now is a good time to put on your qualitative glasses, dust off your EA principles, policies, guidelines, and standards to ensure they support your business and the evolving cloud delivery model. Take them to your business before the Business do something without you!

This approach applies equally to all new technologies that cause a major disruption…think BYOD!

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